Letters to the Editor

Build the toll road

IN ITS--let us hope--preliminary vote to pull county support from the rest area access/toll road project designed to ease area traffic congestion, the overnight majority on the Spotsylvania Board of Supervisors made three errors. (1) Substance. After the flameout of the Outer Connector beltway plan in 2003, regional officials, including Spotsylvanians, began studying ways to ease the slow crawl that often passes for vehicular mobility in these parts. Four years later, they unveiled the toll-road project, which would ease congestion especially on Stafford County's U.S. 17, on Spotsylvania County's State Route 3, and on the length of I-95 that serves this region....

Attack religious charities and wound the poor

WASHINGTON--Some issues fade; others fester. The Obama administration's contraceptive mandate on religious charities, hospitals, and universities is the festering kind--which explains Obama's Friday pullback from that diktat. The initial reaction to the mandate concerned the rights of institutions. Catholic organizations naturally resented being forced to buy health insurance that covers sterilization, contraceptives, and drugs that can end a pregnancy soon after conception. The Obama administration seems to have calculated that since contraceptives are popular and the Catholic Church is not, the outcry would be isolated....

Great Lives/Griffin Bookstore advertisement for Feb. 12, 2012: The Lovings, and Jackie Robinson

IN RECOGNITION of Black History Month, the Chappell Great Lives Lecture Series presents two landmark instances of discrimination and the courageous Americans who confronted them. On Tuesday, Feb. 14, at 7:30 p.m. in Dodd Auditorium, the same night that it premieres on HBO, the Great Lives lecture will show clips from "The Loving Story," with guests attorney Bernard Cohen, who was part of the ACLU team that represented the Lovings before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Peggy Fortune, the Lovings' daughter....

The face is vaguely familiar, and so is the speech

THE DISTRICT of Columbia has been called the Hollywood of the East, minus the glamour. It is a city consumed with itself, existing on an overinflated, out-of-touch sense of importance, sheltered from the realities of a challenged world. Although I think it has glamour in its own way, the rest of this description is spot on. I work on Capitol Hill, and we really get our Hollywood on come State of the Union night. The "SOTU," as it is known among Hill staffers, is our Oscars, and Capitol Hill tends to buzz that evening, regardless of what political party resides in the White House. From SOTU-watching parties to SOTU-drinking games, where shots are taken every time the president repeats certain poll-tested language, staff members--who never really left the fraternity scene--love this night. It can be an embarrassing sight, especially when taking into consideration what the speech has become....

RICHLY LAYERED SAGA OF SLAVES

"TO Free A Family: The Journey of Mary Walker" by Sydney Nathans tells the heart-rending story of an enslaved woman who escapes to freedom and then spends the next 17 years trying to secure liberty for her mother and three children. Like many enslaved women who fled, Mary left because she was convinced she would soon be sold off the plantation, and the question was not if she would be separated from her family, but when. This book is rich in layers, as it also tells the story of the Northern family who tried to help Mary, the Southern family from which she fled, and the bigger picture of abolitionists, anti-racists, and routes and methods of escape from slavery. It highlights the even bigger picture of America in the 1840s and 1850s, grappling for a solution on how to pacify both the North and the South and deal with the problem of slavery....

What's good for business is good for the state?

During the summer, my daughter and I heard that Jimmy Buffett was coming to Northern Virginia. Knowing that Jimmy always came to Nissan Pavilion, I started to look for tickets. It took a little while to find ticket information, because Nissan Pavilion is now named Jiffy Lube Live, which was a little confusing....

Literature with naughty words? A Catch-22

Literature with naughty words? A Catch-22 I recently read about a Ruth Allen in Bedford County who is attempting to have a book banned from her son's middle school for the foul language it contains....

WE ARE YOUR NEIGHBORS: A LOCAL LOOK AT A DIVERSE & WORLDWIDE CHURCH

THE FREDERICKSBURG area is rich in people who firmly claim the right to religious freedom, a tradition that dates back at least to 1779 when Thomas Jefferson drafted the remarkable Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom in this community. As the ecclesiastical leader of my church in this area I am grateful to Mr. Jeffer-son for his foresight, not only as a leader in Virginia, but as an inspiration to the world. My church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, known more commonly as Mormons. Owing to the seeming hailstorm of questions and events surrounding the church at this time, I thought it a great opportunity to write about our beliefs and activities. My hope is to provide a moment of truth and reflection about us as a people, away from the distractions of politics and misrepresentations of our beliefs. I suspect that for many living in our region Mormons are a bit of a mystery....

Mormonism and the presidency: Don't worry

IT IS A basic rule of politics that liberal and conservative commentators won't find much to agree about in an election year. Apparently, the rule doesn't apply to the subject of Mitt Romney's religious beliefs. Mitt's Mormonism has been the source of concern from prominent pundits on the left and the right. The most common anxiety about having a Mormon president, voiced by Slate.com's Jacob Weissberg and former Reagan speechwriter Hal Gordon, is the alleged gullibility of Mormon believers. Describing Mormonism as "Scientology plus 125 years," Weissberg concludes that the holding of some religious views are disqualifying for a presidential candidate because they "indicate a basic failure to think for himself."...

WRONG NUMBER BECOMES JUST RIGHT

SOPHIE KINSELLA'S latest is a British confection delivered on Valentine's Day for a cheerful chuckle during the winter doldrums. Despite initial reluctance to dip into this unabashedly chick-lit offering, I found I was able to get a clear connection with "I've Got Your Number," a cellphone-oriented caper that rang true from the first chapter....

JUST WHAT IS FREE?

AN EARLY mantra of the Internet was Stewart Brand's 1984 assertion that "Information wants to be free." Now much of the content of the Internet is free--think Google and Wikipedia. Yet there is a real downside to "free." If you cannot get paid for your work, how much effort will you put into it? The term "digital parasites" in the book's title is apt, at least from the author's perspective. As more and more Web developers reprocess material created by others, less and less creativity is being applied to developing truly new material for the Web. Instead the world is slowly moving to what Robert Levine calls "closed systems." Good examples of a closed system are the Xbox, whose users pay for content, or an iPhone, whose users purchase apps. A successful Xbox game or iPhone app can be very profitable to the developers. Closed systems maximize the revenue of successful developers, but they place a charge, or toll, on all users....